Slobberbone – Introductory Page

Slobberbone

Slobberbone were loud and drunk and from Texas. They’ve sold an estimated 14 total albums in the last 20 years, and eight of those were to the band members’ wives and parents. They broke up in the mid-2000s and nobody gave a crap. Half their songs are about getting drunk and the other half are about getting dumped by girls for being drunk. Their name sounds like a parody. You’ve never heard of them and if you hadn’t stumbled across this particular webpage by accident while searching for your favorite Ron Jeremy videos at 2 in the morning, you never would have.

They were also arguably the most kickass band in America during the second Clinton administration.

Look past an admittedly sloppy and inebriated exterior and you’ll find plenty of hidden emotional range and sophistication. Frontman Brent Best is a truly gifted songwriter, as capable of weaving together evocative, abstract imagery as he is of snorting out razorblade one-liners about a fight in a hillbilly bar; as naturally able to conjur up near-metallic bar band rave-ups as he was weep-worthy country ballads. But if you’re like me and “sloppy and inebriated” sounds like a ringing endorsement when it comes to rock ‘n roll bands, then you don’t have to look past shit. The searing lead guitar work of Michael Hill, and later Jess Barr, combined with the slamming rhythm section of bassist Brian Lane and drummer Tony Harper, helped make Slobberbone the most ferocious alt-country band of the ‘90s.

Like I said, Slobberbone never got remotely popular and split up after four albums, having originally formed in the early ‘90s as University of North Texas students in Denton. They reformed with a new member or two under a different name, the Drams, and made one more album, the superb Jubilee Dive, in 2006, on which they explored power pop and psychedelia in a way the pretty reliably twangy Slobberbone mostly hadn’t. Since then they’ve played a few sporadic shows here and there and not experiencing any modicum of music industry success (Best’s lone solo album, 2015’s wonderful Your Dog, Champ, certainly being no exception). I’ve never gotten to see them live. Meanwhile Coldplay are still selling tons of records and I accidentally attended one song of an All-American Rejects concert recently. Just fucking kill me.